Space Engineers

DISCLAIMER: This is a review of an unfinished product, and as such is subject to change pending final release

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Space Engineers is a (currently Early Access) first-person space sandbox game originally released October 23, 2013 on Steam for PC. You play as an astronaut/"space engineer" and have the ability to design and build voxel block-based bases, ships, weaponry, techno-gadgets or anything you can set your mind to, essentially. It features completely and dynamically destructible environments and creations, manmade structures, resource gathering/mining, a robust crafting and inventory system, native Steam Workshop support and online multiplayer and major features such as planetary exploration are promised in future updates. The game, still unfinished and in early development, has had a massive number of additional features and blocks added to it which have drastically increased the game's scope since its original launch in 2013.

Graphically, the game is impressive, with decent-quality textures and lighting for an indie title that's two years old. You can definitely tell a difference in quality depending on how high you have your settings adjusted to, though, which may go without saying. Due to the sparseness of its setting, there is little to no pop-in, although LOD transitions are perhaps easier to notice given that the only moving objects on screen are generally asteroids, ships, stations and possibly debris.

In terms of performance, the game is somewhat more of a heavyweight than it lets on although one assumes that this is due to the real-time calculations necessary for dynamic voxel deformation in the game engine alongside the fact that the game's not finished yet. My computer uses a standard-clocked Core i7-3770K and an MSI GTX660Ti Power Edition with 16GB of DDR3-1600 RAM and yet in order to obtain a decent (read: playable at 20ish fps) framerate I essentially have to lower its resolution to 720p and put all graphical settings on low. This is somewhat of a disappointment especially given that the recent launch of Grand Theft Auto V on Steam seems to perform better than this game on my machine with more graphical complexity and a higher resolution.

Netcode in online multiplayer is still quite janky, as of a couple of months ago, although a recent patch is supposed to have improved this somewhat. Your mileage may vary, although on my household's (~850kb/s dl/~160kb/s ul) cable internet connection in Washington state I was still regularly getting desyncs and physics kludginess when playing on a friend's client-side server located across the country in North Carolina. Let's just say that there was quite a bit of death involved on my side in confined spaces due to collision hijinks. That said, when it works, it works and the multiplayer experience of cooperatively surviving in the remote vastness of space is quite wonderful.

As I mentioned earlier, mod support is one of the selling points of this game, with integrated Steam Workshop support having been available for over a year. I've seen people do everything from add new blocks to write C-like programming scripts for programmable blocks to even changing the skybox image. It's truly amazing the kinds of things people will develop for a game given enough time and the right opportunity.

Overall, I'd say the game is quite enjoyable in its unfinished state. And if you're not into space, Keen Software House (the developers) are developing a counterpart Early Access title called Medieval Engineers that has plenty of potential in its own right.

Review originally written November 9, 2013 on Steam, edited for repost